Originally tasked with a tactical and strategic design charter, my mandate grew considerably as the company came to recognize just how impactful a company-wide design focus is to the company’s success.

 

I now lead the newly formed Customer Experience organization as Senior Vice President, reporting directly to the CEO. My team works to empower all divisions of the company, from executives to individual contributors, to make innovation and customer focus central to their thinking. Our goal is to equip an entire organization with 21st century leadership skills: from curiosity to a bias toward action and experimentation to the ability to collaborate across boundaries. We believe that these are the leadership skills that will drive innovation across the business.

 

Often referred to as a “center of excellence” for design-driven innovation, this new organization brings design thinking and doing to the highest levels of executive leadership at Citrix.  We consider everyone at the company an active contributor in creating exceptional experiences for customers and partners, both inside and outside the company.  At Citrix, everyone can be a design leader.

 

TIMELINE

2010 – Executive Support and Grassroots Excitement

Strong focus on executive engagement – Executives from across the organization were sent to the Stanford d.school to learn and embrace the key elements of design thinking. Executives were asked not so much to dictate this new approach to employees, but to champion, encourage, and support projects that were taking this approach. Executive support helped generate the much-needed enthusiasm and interest in design thinking that was key to the momentum of the internal adoption of the idea.  Today we have built an in-house catalyst and training program, which I describe below. But we still leverage the d.school to train selected executive across the company, giving them a valuable n external perspective, and helping them learn the power and language of design thinking.

 

Provide employees a basic understanding of design principles –We knew we could not create design leaders everywhere overnight, and we did not want to drive a mandate. We wanted to start by making design into something people could relate to, and wanted to learn more about.  We started by working to give employees a basic understanding of the principles of design thinking.

 

Laying out our five core design principles, as relevant today as when they were first articulated, was a crucial first step in making design thinking relatable to everyone across the company.  This video is one example of how we convey these to employees, in a manner anyone can understand and related to:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJT340fooKA  

 

The five principles are:

·      Focus on users: Who is your customer? We all have a customer… whether they are internal or external… it’s your job to meet their needs.

·      Make it simple: Do the hard work, so your users don’t have to. Customers will eagerly adopt products and processes that make doing their job easy.

·      Inspire delight: Exceed your user’s expectations. We want people to actually enjoy - even love – their every experience with all things Citrix.

·      Exhibit craftsmanship: Attend to fit and finish, and take pride in the quality of your work.

·      Deliver unique value: We can all be innovators. We want to do things in new and better ways. Citrix stands for excellence, not the status quo. 

 

An important step was exposing employees to these principles wherever possible. Every new Citrix hire learns about them on his or her first day at work. We’ve created posters, a handbook, and a website with examples and stories to make the principles relatable to all employees.  We featured them at a global employee meeting. We even created a badge card listing them – and thousands of employees wear this card today, along with their corporate ID.

 

2011 – Creative Space and Support to Make Real Change Happen
 

Build an awesome creative space – Inspired by the d.school’s open, collaborative design space, I knew that creating a culture of innovation and driving behavioral change at Citrix would require a radically new approach to the way work happens. To accomplish this, I championed a project to build a collaborative design studio at our Silicon Valley headquarters.

 

The design studio provides 2000 sq. ft. of open space where team members from multiple disciplines come together to share ideas, iterate, and innovate. Everything in the space—tables, whiteboards, comfy chairs and couches—is modular and completely customizable, allowing teams to adapt on the fly, and shape their workflows in real time as work happens.

 

The space is low-tech by design, filled with markers, sticky notes, and every quick-and-dirty prototype material under the sun—from construction paper to pipe cleaners. It’s also intentionally designed to be unbook-able, since no one can “schedule” innovation. The casualness of the space puts people in the right frame of mind to go outside of their traditional comfort zones and build stronger relationships with teammates. Even the most analytical team members can't help but sketch their thoughts and ideas on the table whiteboards while they sit and chat.

 

The design studio is an example of how a nontraditional workspace can foster collaboration, enable new modes of communication, and improve the quality of the products we produce for customers. Instead of preaching the merits of collaboration and working across teams, it just started happening. Teams that were typically “collaborating” in cubes via email and instant message were now emerging from their cubes and meeting in the design space to truly collaborate.  They would leave their computers behind and gather around a whiteboard to ideate and draw concepts. People were ideating, prototyping and experimenting without being told because the space fostered the right behavior. The employees were leading the change to design thinking. They were the leaders.

 

Since the opening of our first space, six additional design spaces have opened at Citrix offices around the globe, with three more scheduled to open soon. This demonstrates the company's fiscal and strategic commitment to design thinking. But note too that it has been employees who’ve demanded that these spaces be built. People who had the opportunity to work in one of these space immediately saw their value, and, self-motivated, led the charge to create one in their locale. Another great example of design leadership emerging via experiences rather than mandates.

 

These spaces have had such an impact, not just for the design team, but for teams across the company. It is regularly used by groups such as IT, HR and Finance. We never would have imagined this when first brought the concept to life. An added bonus is that this initiative helps further the broader WorkAnywhere effort, aimed at making all our offices better-suited to collaboration and flexible workstyles. This video highlights WorkAnywhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkxYUt8isiY

 

 

Supporting real change – Last year, I asked Julie Baher to direct a new Business Design team, to foster collaboration with all divisions across the company (Sales, Human Resources, Legal, Operations, IT, etc.) as part of a series of strategic initiatives, and to develop exceptional experiences for customers, partners, and employees.  This would be a critical mechanism for developing leaders across the organization.

 

Julie and the new Business Design team took on a charter to infuse design thinking into the organization from multiple directions:

 

·      Top-down – By continuing to send VP’s and key business unit GM’s to the Stanford programs, so they would understand the language and toolset of design thinking, gain an external perspective on their work, and be motivated to support design thinking initiatives.

·      Sideways – By holding design thinking workshops for mid-level managers and mid-career individual contributors, empowering them with a means of tackling key challenges.

·      Bottom-up – By leveraging various employee touchpoints -  such as global all-org meetings, the company intranet, and new hire training – to disseminate key messages about what it means to have a design thinking approach.  To the same end, the business design team also provides dedicated project support to a wide variety of partners, across the company.

 

None of these program or initiatives was mandated or required. We wanted to attract people who see value in what we’re doing, or have an intrinsic interest in it. We knew these people would be the real leaders. And to date, all our classes and workshops are oversubscribed, and we couldn’t possibly accept every offer to collaborate. Our goal is to teach people to fish. We want to spread the expertise and the design leadership skills across the company, so those new leaders can teach their teams. So far this approach has been a great success!

 

 

The team also engaged design firm IDEO to help scale the impact of design thinking at Citrix. In conjunction with the Customer Experience team, they drove a significant design thinking initiative to reinvent how the company on-boards customers.  We wanted to share a real Citrix success story early, so people could see the value of the design thinking approach. By leveraging outside support, we could get an early success that could be shared while we were developing our own design leaders internally, who would then tackle the next set of challenges.

 

In addition, a new design-thinking branding effort was underway. Spearheaded by Uday Gajendar and Andrew Day, the “Design Matters to Me” program brought employees news from within Citrix and the wider design community. The program gave employees insight into how to apply design principles into their everyday jobs, by using real examples of design in action from across the company. We also brought in outside speakers to share their stories of success through investing in design. We also highlighted the “best of” each quarter by awarding “Design Hero” awards to people who demonstrated design leadership and went above and beyond to drive change with design thinking. These stories helped make the impact of design thinking real and relatable. The Design Matters program soon became the ‘brand’ of the design-thinking movement at Citrix and is still an important element today. 

 

 

2012 – Connect and Kickoff

 

Citrix Connect, the company’s annual engineering summit

The Business Design team was given the chance to redesign Connect, the company’s annual engineering summit. Held in five locations across the world— London, Bangalore Santa Clara, Santa Barbara, and Ft. Lauderdale—it was a huge opportunity for the team to evangelize and teach design thinking leadership and skills to more than 2,000 engineers at Citrix.

 

Julie and the Business Design team worked with a boutique agency – LIME Design – to develop a design-thinking strategy for the five-city, three-continent program. Attendees completed an interactive group experience that applied design thinking to solving real business challenges, building low-fidelity prototypes, and testing their solutions. Teams also participated in a crowd-sourced brainstorm experience, generating numerous ideas on how to improve the engineering organization. It was a wild success and was highlighted by employees as inspirational and the best part of the event. Also, many of these ideas have been put into place.

 

Citrix Sales Kickoff
Building on their success at Connect, the Business Design team was then asked to design a similar integrative experience for the company’s annual Sales Kickoff events in Orlando and Singapore.  The goal:  help more than 300 sales leaders learn to use design thinking to take a more creative, analytical, and collaborative approaches to key business problems.

 

The outcome: a six-month Sales Leadership Innovation Challenge.  Sales leaders from across the globe volunteered to participate in a competition to develop solutions to sales challenges, using a design thinking approach.  This upshot was a set of solutions that are currently being implemented to drive the sales business forward.

 

This was not just a success for the sales organization, but a great example of distributed design thinking, as teams collaborated despite being spread around the globe. This is not an easy task, but is one that is a reality of today’s global and mobile workforce. As a company that promotes mobility and creates remote collaboration products, it is critical for us to embrace this reality.  What we have found in the instance of the sales project and others is that there are critical paces where it is key to bring the primary stakeholders together…. such as at the kickoff of a project. The power of having face time with teammates to build a team connection, establish goals and ideate in the beginning of a project, is key. When you set this foundation, you find it much easier to working across the globe, collaborating remotely using video, screen sharing and remote sketching. 

 

2013 – Catalysts, Education, and Ambient Design

 

Citrix Design Catalysts program

 

The Citrix Design Catalysts are a group of more than 100 individual contributors and managers who've done an intensive, three-day internal Citrix design thinking “bootcamp.” This is one of the most important elements of developing design leadership across the company. The goal: enabling these leaders to drive design thinking-focused change projects within their organizations.  As they do this, Catalysts get critical support from the Business Design team, which provides them with both hands-on assistance and a variety of tools and resources, such as a Facilitator’s Guide and Design Thinking Checklist.

 

Anyone can raise his or her hand to be a catalyst. We provide education and support and in return we ask that these new design leaders bring design thinking back to their organizations by spreading awareness and understanding of the approach, but also by tacking real problems . Today throughout the company, in every organization and at every level, Design Catalysts are taking the lead in transforming the way the company works, to focus on giving every user a great experience with Citrix, every time.

 

Setting the Stage for Success

Design innovations are meaningful only if they are implemented. Perhaps naively, we did not realize that this would in fact be the hardest part of the journey…turning design thinking into real results. We have done a variety of things to ensure the success of our new design leaders.

 

Day Two of the business design team’s  bootcamp targets implementation head-on:  Participants craft an execution plan around a design challenge from their everyday responsibilities.  They explore how their project benefits Citrix and Citrix' customers. They create a journey map of the current landscape, noting any current customer pain points and to uncover how needs are served today. As part of the plan, they also create a core team, extended team and identify SME's who they would need to engage. Every project must also have a clear executive sponsor. The plan also shapes their empathy work by identifying analogous and extreme users to target.  They end the day with a commitment to taking that crucial first step.  

 

For some, after leaving a workshop they have all the tools they need to run a project. In those cases, we may do "coaching" and periodically check-in with them or give them tips on how to run a brainstorm or test an idea. For other projects, the business design team will facilitate a "design kickoff" and lead the team through 1-3 days of empathy and ideation. In this model, the team then takes the ideas and prototypes, develops them further and works to implement. The most intense engagements are where the business designers work for 6 weeks to 6 months with a team on wicked problems. In this case, the empathy work may involve several weeks of interviews and visits in multiple locations. Depending on the problem space, prototyping may be more technical and require more than paper and pen! The longer engagements tend to be projects that run across multiple business units or divisions and are directly challenges to the status quo. These require more "selling" of the project, the empathy findings, the ideas to the business and stakeholders so that everyone keeps aligned and the project team has executive supporters who are removing any roadblocks. We learned from experience that forging a new way of working takes a lot of grit, so having a strong ecosystem of support is key.

 

In longer engagements, the business design team is “embedded” during execution phase, checking in with the implementation team on a regular cadence to ensure ideas are implemented or the implementation workarounds are aligned with identified design principles. Business Designers' presence as an extended team member during the implementation phase is one of the ways to ensure ideas are being executed. 

 

Examples  of success include:

1) A better learning experience for customers –  The Citrix Education team partnered with the Business Design team to launch an initiative to improve the experience of learning about and mastering/deploying Citrix products.  Intensive user research yielded several key insights, all around the need to make courses and presentation more relevant to real-world student needs, and to support the ultimate goal of getting to, and maintaining, a successful product deployment.  

 

These insights led the team to make a series of strategic changes both in course offerings, and ways it engages learners.   Courses were redesigned to include more hands-on exercises, and case study material, making them more engaging and relevant to student needs.   Selected course content was also revised to address the needs of system architects, who are key influencers and stakeholders in strategic product deployments.  The team leveraged both Citrix and outside expertise to create "student resource kits" for attendees to access once they're back at work.  These kits provide both help in applying what they've learned, and insights on material not covered in class.  Also forthcoming are new online modularized classes, enabling students to focus on tasks and topics directly relevant to their needs and jobs, without spending time on those that aren't.

 

2)    Using product data to improve customer’s support experience – Citrix support staff and customers have an enormous range of knowledge about our products, how they can best be set up and managed, and how to fix them when problems arise.  But support personnel didn’t always have all this knowledge at their disposal, to assist customers looking for help.  Enthused by his design thinking training, Support Managing Director Mike Stringer looked at customer feedback and had an inspiration:  Why not leverage existing log file data to help users better configure our products to avoid problems, then quickly solve them when they arise?  Mike and his team quickly moved from prototyping to testing, to iterating based on user input.  The upshot:  Citrix AutoSupport, which gives users reliable, targeted information on how to tune and fix problems with their virtualization installations.  AutoSupport shows how listening to, and working with, customers can help companies move quickly from ideas to useful solutions.

 

3)    Compliance training workshop redesign – No one likes to do the legal compliance training required at most corporations.  But the Citrix Legal team isn’t satisfied with forcing folks to do dull interactive exercises and read stultifying compliance guidelines. To improve employees’ knowledge of job-critical compliance standards, Legal put on their design leadership hat and used empathy to realize it needs employees to pay better attention to this training – and that means making the training much more relevant and engaging.  Led by Senior Director Peter Connor, the Legal department partnered with the Business Design team to host a design thinking workshop. The participants did in-depth interviews and ideation sessions with employees, to learn about current pain points and find out how they’d like to engage around the topics of risk and compliance.  Many prototypes and ideas were tested and vetted. From that, a new compliance “journey” was created that is in the process of being rolled out. In the new approach, employees who take the basic courses are able to re-certify in subsequent years, rather than mindlessly repeating the same course. Employees in higher risk positions take a more customized track. The courses themselves were updated with actual case studies and relevant scenarios. By streamlining the course rollout process, the reminders sent to employees and tailoring the courses, we estimate a savings of 3600 hours of employee time in 2013 and over 9000 hours in 2014! If time is money, then a conservative estimate is ~$3 million over the first four years of savings.

 

Increased Investment in Design thinking Education

We’ve also recently brought on a new Director of Education, Diana Joseph, whose sole role is to spread design thinking boot camps within the company, in order to further establish leaders among employees.

 

In addition, we’re offering a course called “Design Thinking for Managers.” The course addresses the unique challenges of managing teams at Citrix. The idea is to help managers leverage and support the innovation and creativity of their teams.

 

The class presents clear ways for managers become design leaders by  accelerating creativity & innovation through:

·      Rewards – highlighting team members who try new things through a new “culture of experimentation” strategy

·      Recognition – creating “team heroes” who reach out to customers, empathize with their issues, and create novel solutions

·      Environment – creating new spaces in the office that allow for flexible working and innovation, such as small design studios

 

Design is Everywhere: Ambient Design

As design thinking continues to gain momentum, one of the challenges facing the program is providing the tools and space employees need, wherever those employees might be working at the moment. This is the idea behind ambient design thinking.

 

One of the best examples of ambient design thinking is the Business Design team’s recently launched “pop-up studio” program.  Each is set up for a short time in an common space, such as a cafeteria, with designers gathering input from coworkers on reshaping key elements of the Citrix employee experience.  Informal and relaxed, these popups have been both well attended and amazingly generative.  Early sessions have produced great insights and suggestions on the design of new onboarding procedures, improving learning and development offerings to employees, reconfiguring café spaces to encourage collaboration, and more.  With groups throughout the company following up on these and other contributions, several organizations, including HR and Corporate Citizenship, have signed up to partner in future pop-ups, hoping to gather vital input for their own initiatives. Here’s a time-lapsed video of a pop-up in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQqeNRi8h8